small daily paintings

Saturday, December 2, 2017

While I am in London, I paint a few days a week with the Dulwich Art Group in south London, who have been most welcoming to me. During the model sessions there, I have been forcing myself to paint much more quickly than usual and therefore much more loosely. I read somewhere that - in any endeavor - if you aren't making yourself uncomfortable, you aren't working hard enough. Working quickly makes me uncomfortable. so I guess that here in London, discomfort is my goal!

This quick morning study is an experiment with a colorful background, in this case pink. The first paint strokes were difficult to read because they slid around on the rather smooth surface and the skintones were the same sort of color and value as the background. But I think it got better with thicker paint. I had a dark shadow color at first, but in the end I wiped it out and let the pink show through. Definitely an uncomfortable choice.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

I have been looking around at the blogs of friends - and others - who make artwork and I love reading a little something about their work or life on each post. So I have decided to do the same.

The painting above is done in gouache - a medium I used to use to create textile designs, but haven't touched in many years. Living in a rented flat in London at the moment, I am hesitant to paint with oils for fear of making an indelible mark on something, so I bought a few tubes of gouache, which is water based and easier to clean up. The painting above is a first effort. The scene is in Ruskin Park, South London at sunset. I made an effort to use the gouache as much like oil paint as possible, given their differences, and found that apart from the globs of paint drying too quickly on the palette, I could actually layer and manipulate it in a way that felt rather painterly.